Legit ReviewsNewsTime to Change Your Password for 2013? Top 25 Most Commonly Used Passwords

Time to Change Your Password for 2013? Top 25 Most Commonly Used Passwords

Posted by Nathan Kirsch| Sun, Dec 23, 2012 - 7:52 AM

SplashData’s annual “25 Worst Passwords of the Year” list was released this fall, but it serves as a good reminder to change your passwords for the new year. If any of your passwords are on this list, then you should go change them right now! Security experts say that you should always have different passwords for each site, but few people do. SplashData’s top 25 list was compiled from files containing millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers.

Top 25 Passwords of 2012 in order from most used to least:

password

123456

12345678

abc123

qwerty

monkey

letmein

dragon

111111

baseball

iloveyou

trustno1

1234567

sunshine

master

123123

welcome

shadow

ashley

football

jesus

michael

ninja

mustang

password1

The top three passwords, “password,” “123456,” and “12345678,” remain unchanged from last year’s list. If you have any one of these as your password, consider changing it to something stronger. A good way to strengthen your current password would be to substitute letters for numbers or symbols. For example, “snowday” would be stronger as “$n0wDay!” Underscores, dashes, hyphens, and other punctuation marks are your friend!

“We’re hoping that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different websites,” said SplashData CEO Morgan Slain.